A blog about the works and worlds of HP Lovecraft and my feeble attempts to illustrate them.

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Sketches, sketches and more sketches.

Took another hiatus away from the land of Lovecraft for a spell, working on other projects, including a sketchbook of all of my sketches I've done in the past few months, which will include my Lovecraftian stuff as well as others. I've also redirected my energies to my new Tumblr sites:

http://hplovecraftart.tumblr.com/

http://markwf85.tumblr.com/

I've come to prefer Tumblr simply because it's easier to post artwork, and especially amenable to sketches, and overall it's a lot less demanding to use, as well as being a lot more convenient to edit than blogger. Unfortunately I just started my Lovecraftian Tumblr, as I thought it better to open it before someone else took advantage of the opportunity, and so there's not a whole lot there, though that'll be where you'll see most of my Lovecraftian sketches from now on, whereas I'll primarily use blogger for finished pieces.

Old Wizard Whateley.

This was done as demonstration to another artist, as he had erroneously illustrated the venerable old malcontent with a large chin. His thought process was that he couldn't find a way to illustrate a chinless Wizard without making him look goofy. I begged to differ. So I illustrated this demonstration for him with a view to showing that there are plenty of ways to make a character creepy, with or without a chin. This sketch was done on Ipad in the app Procreate.

Lavinia. This was done for the same artist, as he erroneously drew her with black hair, whereas she's described as being an albino in the story. Mind you he was kind of enough to take my criticism into consideration and changed several things to be more accurate to the source material. Again, done on the Ipad, using Procreate.

Another Ipad sketch, this one of old Zadok Allan.

Another Ipad sketch of Innsmouth, done for an inquirer about

what I would do with the dilapidated old town.

An Ipad sketch of a couple citizens of Innsmouth. I actually enjoy subtly warping the human anatomy for the only slightly deformed Innsmouthites, rather than doing what most artists do and go all out with full-blown fish-anthropomorphs.

Those are the last of my Ipad sketches, as I've since packed up my Ipad 3 and prepared it for sale and replaced it with a Microsoft Surface Pro. The reason for the change is that the Surface Pro is less a tablet than a laptop in tablet form, as it can run any program that a pc or macbook could run, including Photoshop, Painter 12 and any pc-based art program you can think of; unlike the Ipad, which, while well-rounded, can only at best use truncated or trimmed-down versions of pc programs. The rest of the sketches were done in Photoshop CS6 on the Surface Pro, using several different brushes.

I'm currently working on an Ulthar painting for my artbook. These were more or less throwaway designs, as I was just trying to explore different cultural motifs as I tried to find designs that were both homely and slightly foreign.

Another painting I'm working on is one of the Gardner farm, which you can see designs and thumbnails of below. From an architectural perspective, if there's anything I loath about Lovecraft's descriptions it's his obsession with gambrel roofs; to me they in no way look stately and instead make a house look like those barns you can buy at a Lowes store or Home Depot.

Herbert West. Thought I'd do a sketch of him, as I haven't seen too many illustrations of him as toe-headed, which he's described as in the story. I wanted him to have some dramatic lighting but couldn't decide what, so I went with three that came to mind.

Plan to do a painting of him for the artbook, but nothing as yet comes to mind as to what angle or what context to render him in; most of the paintings from my list below that I haven't started yet are currently not started quite simply because I just don't currently have a defined image in my head as to how to create them, rather than any reluctance on my part to complete them.